She’d barely formed the thought when a boot crunched on the path outside and he was there, taking the steps three at a time, an elementally male figure crossing the wooden floor in long, fluid strides.
And then she was in his arms, wrapped in their strength, and his lips were on hers. And she was swept away, into the beckoning heat, into the fiery furnace of their mutual desire.
Every night it burned hotter; every day the inevitable abrading of their senses, relief withheld until the dark of night, only stoked the flames higher.
And the urgency built.
To night she welcomed it. To night she had her own agenda and was relying on that driving pounding in their blood to give her the strength and the opportunity to pursue it.
She made no demur when he invaded her mouth and ravaged her senses, when he drew her flush against him, then evocatively stroked, one large palm gliding over the curve of her hip and derriere, then firming, cupping, and provocatively kneading.
Her breath caught as he molded her to him, her senses threatened to fracture as the hard ridge of his erection rode against the soft tautness of her belly. Heat flared; the furnace swelled. A hot empty ache yawned deep within her.
She only gasped when he tumbled them both onto the sofa; she landed beside and half under him, their legs tangled, hands grasping.
He flicked loose the buttons of her bodice. She wrenched the sides of his coat wide, ran her hands up to his shoulders to push the garment off. He muttered a curse, and pulled back enough to shrug free of the jacket. She fell on the buttons of his waistcoat; he muttered another oath and obliged.
But then he kissed her again and pressed her back against the sofa, rapidly dealt with buttons, bodice, and chemise—and then his hand was on her breast and she gasped again, louder, lungs tighter, tightening yet further as his palm cruised, stroked, then his hand closed and his fingers settled to play, to pluck her nerves, to orchestrate the pleasure that rushed through her. It was a swirling, mindless temptation of delight; she let it flow and wash through her, until she found her feet.
Until she could marshal and harbor and ultimately wield enough wit and will to kiss him back, to raise a hand and frame his face, meet his tongue with hers, and distract him.
Long enough to undo the buttons closing his shirt, long enough to slide her hand beneath the gaping linen, and touch him.
His reaction was instantaneous. He broke the kiss and sucked in a breath; his whole body hardened and stilled. But he didn’t pull away. In the darkness she couldn’t see his expression, yet his face seemed tight, lashes lowered, jaw clenched. As if her hand were burning him, as if her touch were something it pained him to endure…but it was he who was burning.
His skin felt like lava poured over solid rock, smooth, almost fluid, yet beneath it nothing moved.
Determined to know, to learn, she caressed, for a long moment gave her senses over to exploring the heavy muscles of his chest, sweeping both hands across, then lower to slide over his ridged abdomen, to glide farther and grasp his sides at his waist, to feel the naked skin like flame beneath her palms.
For one instant she gloried, filling her senses with the perfection of him, then he broke. He pressed her down into the sofa cushions, leaned over her and recaptured her mouth—and without quarter ripped her wits away.
Swept her will away, sent it spinning beneath an onslaught of feeling, of his actions and her reactions, of an exchange at a wholly different level of greedy rapacious need.
Of hunger more explicit, more definite, less controlled. She marveled and embraced it. Let herself slide into it, let it flow around and over and through her, fascinated and enthralled.
This was what she wanted to see, to know, to examine. This—his desire—was what she needed to explore.
Charlie kept her pressed into the sofa, kept her mouth locked with his, kept her wits whirling while he grappled with a conundrum he’d never before faced, not in this arena, not with any other woman. Contradictory compulsions rode him, each merciless and demanding—an instinctive desire to appease her, to happily fall in with her blatantly declared wishes and show her all she wantonly wished to know, if anything to encourage her even further, yet his plan called for something else. Dictated a different line of play—of attack.
Her small hands had pushed beneath the back of his shirt; her fingers gripped and pressed into his skin. Urgent, needy.
The innocent touch seared him. Called to that hunger, the prowling ravenous beast that she so readily aroused and sent raging.
Every instinct he possessed was clamoring to take her, to finish this strange wooing now and have done, yet…if he showed her all, if he joined with her to night, would she be sufficiently enamored of the pleasures of the flesh to happily agree to be his forevermore?
If he joined with her to night, would she agree to marry him tomorrow? With any other young lady, the answer would be yes, but with Sarah…she’d already surprised him multiple times.
No. Safer by far to hold to his plan and give her time and experience from which to properly appreciate the splendors of plea sure. To learn of the delights to which he proposed to introduce her, and to subsequently enjoy with her for the rest of their lives.
How could she appreciate if she didn’t truly know? If she didn’t understand what the elements of plea sure were?
Teaching her, introducing her to plea sure step-by-step, as he’d planned, was the wiser course. The course more certain to succeed in convincing her to accept his proposal and agree to be his.
Despite the lure of her supple, soft body, so quintessentially feminine stretched half beneath his, despite the wanton encouragement of her kiss, of the way she gifted him with her mouth, the way she met and challenged him, and taunted and teased…not that she actually meant to…he had to remember what the course of wisdom was. He couldn’t afford to forget.
Couldn’t afford not to have her eager and willing to be his bride.
So he reined in his own desires, ruthlessly quelled his rioting instincts and resisted her lure, resisted the open invitation she was so blatantly issuing. Blotted it from his mind and drew back from the kiss, and set his lips skimming down her throat.
Down over her collarbone, tugging aside her gaping bodice to gain access to the rosy peaks of her breasts. Then he settled to show her what plea sure was. One element of it, at least.
One compulsive, giddy, dizzying facet; her responses were more intense than the previous night’s, heightened by the last time and the frustrations of the day. Good. He focused on her, on her reactions, with lips, mouth, teeth, and tongue concentrated on immersing her senses in the heady, enticing delight.
As before, the taste of her awakening was sheer wonder to him. For every iota of delight he gave her, she reciprocated in a way he’d never before even imagined existed.
She writhed beneath his experienced caresses, the firm touch of his hands, the wet heat of his mouth, the shocking rasp of his tongue drawing gasp after smothered moan from her lusciously swollen lips. As he bent his head and drew one taut and aching nipple deep into his mouth, and heard her cry out, he felt a curious sense of honor warm him. It was not just that he was the lucky man who would introduce her to sensual plea sure, that he would be her mentor in this, the one to educate her senses in this intimate field, but that he was all that at her invitation. By her choice.
He had chosen her as his bride, but part of his unacknowledged reasoning had been that he’d hoped, if she were given the choice, that she would choose him.
In this, in this arena. And she had.
It was, he was discovering, an unexpectedly heady honor to be chosen by her—an honor conferred by her desire. He’d had no idea that such a thing would mean so much to him, that despite his frustrated needs, he would so enjoy these moments. These never-to-be-repeated moments when he opened her sensual eyes to passion and all its glory.
Entranced, nearly mesmerized by sensation, Sarah was nevertheless conscious of time passing; at some point, he
would call a halt to their night, and she’d yet to make any real progress. Just a glimpse before he’d slammed a door on his desire, that was all she’d seen. She needed to see more.
The only way to succeed was to circumvent his control.
Gathering sufficient will along with sufficient strength required concerted effort, but eventually she managed to turn her mind from what her reeling senses were reporting enough to refocus on him.
Sliding her hands from his back, she tried to reach lower but discovered she couldn’t reach even as far as his waist. Palms at his sides, she urged him higher, but he ignored such weak demands.
And tried to distract her by suckling more deeply—she had to pause, drag in a huge breath, hold tight to her wits as sensation sharp and powerful threatened to rip them away…she succeeded, managed to catch her mental breath, then even more determined, she tried again.
Drawing one hand from the warmth of his torso, she found his jaw, cupped it, and gently but insistently nudged and tipped until he complied, lifted his head and brought his lips to hers.
She was ready to meet them, ready to let their mouths meld, their tongues twine, then duel. Then she wriggled and slid beneath him, one quick shift so that their heads were closer to level. In the same movement, she drew her other hand from his back, pressed it between them, and found him, his erection hard and rigid beneath his breeches.
Boldly she stroked, then experimented and closed her hand.
His reaction was immediate. Despite the clamp of her hand on his jaw, he drew back from the kiss, a curse on his lips; half lifting from her, he caught her wrist in a viselike grip and hauled her hand from his straining flesh. “No.” Raising her hand above her head, he anchored it against the sofa cushions; from a distance of shadowed inches, he met her eyes. His were narrowed.
She glared at him. “Why?”
“Because—”
He broke off on a hiss as she wriggled, squirmed, and managed to caress that most sensitive and, for her purposes, useful part of him with her thigh. His eyes closed, but his jaw set even harder. He swore, grabbed her other hand and anchored that above her head, too, as he shifted over her, then he lowered his weight and she was trapped.
Beneath him. Half a second’s consideration informed her that that was not necessarily a bad thing. One of his legs lay between hers, his knee sinking into the thick cushions so that the hard muscle of his thigh rode against the sensitive spot at the apex of hers.
The result gave her pause.
But then she remembered. Narrowing her eyes on his, she demanded, “Why?”
Each of her hands was locked in one of his; he was pressing both into the cushions above and to either side of her head. Their faces were close; he looked down into hers. “Because you’re not ready for that yet.”
Each word was bitten off. Grim frustration invested them.
She considered all she could see, all she could sense in the hard, taut, definitely aroused body above hers. “Why not?”
She made the demand a trifle less challenging, more a sincere question, but that she was not going to be fobbed off nevertheless rang in her tone.
He studied her eyes, then searched her face. A moment ticked past in which their heated bodies cooled not one whit, in which the passion trembling in the air about them subsided not at all, then his lips twisted, a resigned grimace.
The odd notion flitted across her mind that she wasn’t certain the resignation was real. Charlie surrendering? That didn’t seem likely.
“You can’t—shouldn’t—just plunge into this. It shouldn’t be considered as a simple act, but an art. Not only in the execution, but in the enjoyment, too. So you need to learn, and at a reasonable pace.”
In the shadowed dark, she could see his eyes but had no hope of reading them. But she wasn’t witless; he wanted control of the pace. They would see. She shifted, just a fraction, beneath him, enough to draw his attention to her bare, swollen, tightly peaked breasts. “So, what’s next?”
Her tone had once again found its sultry note.
He met her eyes for a heartbeat, then lowered his head. Whispered his answer to her unvoiced challenge over her lips. “If you think you’re ready?”
She met his gaze as he drew back a fraction. “Oh, yes.”
Then she kissed him, or he kissed her—all that mattered was that their lips met in a sharp exchange that set instant spark to the hungry flames that had simmered, held down by force of will while they spoke.
Now those flames roared anew. Compelling, driving.
What next? Her question rang in her mind while the urgent need to know filled her. His lips on hers, he drew her hands higher, then manacled both in one of his. Above her, he shifted his weight, so that while one thigh remained between hers, his weight rested beside her. She sensed him reach down, with his free hand grasp her skirt, then he flicked it up above her knees.
He reached beneath, his hard palm gripping and sliding over her bare thigh, and she shuddered.
And he stopped. His hand remained where it was, although she could sense the effort it cost to stop there, on the cusp of what ever came next.
His lips gentled; before he could draw back from the kiss and speak—ask her if she was sure—she arched and kissed him fiercely, and gave him his answer.
His grip on her thigh eased, his touch instantly assuming a more dangerous, more seductive intent. His tongue probed, stroked hers, then withdrew; with only the pressure of his lips to distract her, her senses slid down to focus on his hand. On the play of his fingers as they rose, trailing spiraling sensation upward to the crease between torso and thigh. One blunt fingertip traced it, forward, then back an inch, forward then back; totally caught, barely breathing, she waited to see, to know…
His palm slid along her hip, then pushed over and back as he rolled to his side, taking her with him. He released her hands; unthinking, she let them fall to his shoulders, caught in the shock of feeling his questing hand rove over her bare bottom. His other hand cradled her head, holding her mouth to his, his to plunder at his languid will while the hand beneath her skirts explored.
Also at his will. Under his complete and absolute control.
Despite the compelling, distracting sensations, the enthrallment of her senses, the shivery cascade of heightened awareness that slid over and through her and made her quake in anticipation, she was conscious to her bones of his concentration. Of the unwavering focus he brought to the moment. A commitment not only to maintaining that unshakable control, his bulwark and defense, but to her, to her plea sure, to, as he’d put it, teaching her this art.
To educating her senses in how it felt to have his hand idly fondling her bare bottom, to have him stroke, caress, then trace the cleft between the taut hemispheres, following it down to lightly, intimately, flirt in the hollow between her thighs.
She shuddered, and pressed nearer, turned her body to his, slid one hand to his nape and asked for more through their kiss.
He hesitated, then his fingers left the sensitive skin at the top and back of her thighs, skating down until he reached her knee, then he gripped and lifted, bending and wrapping that leg high over his hip. Briefly he caressed her knee, then his fingers slowly trailed back down the line of her thigh, to where the delicate flesh between her thighs was now open and exposed to his touch.
She shivered again, but he didn’t stop; he reached and touched, lightly brushed her curls, stroked tantalizingly through them, then settled to not so much explore as map, to outline rather than probe. The light caresses made her nerves flicker and skitter, substantial enough for her to follow his intent, to track each caress to its end, yet every time be left hungry, waiting for the next.
Waiting for tactile fulfillment of some barely perceived desire. Her flesh heated, then throbbed; a strange restlessness gripped her. The yearning for him to touch her more intimately burgeoned and grew.
Swelled until it fed her desire, fanned the flames…
He seemed to know the precise
moment when she was about to break and demand more; he drew back from the kiss, skated his lips along the line of her jaw to her ear, then murmured, “When we’re wed, you’ll open yourself to me like this, part your legs and wind them about my waist, and I’ll fill you.”
The words—the image they conjured—transfixed her. In the darkness, she focused on his face, his lips, so close, his eyes screened behind his long lashes. She licked her lips and he glanced at them.
His voice, when it reached her, was pure passion, the distillation of desire. “I’ll fill that odd emptiness inside you.” He spoke slowly, his cadence deliberate, the words direct. “I’ll drive into you, over and over, and you’ll never know such plea sure, and then you’ll be complete.”
Dipping his head, he brushed her lips, one long lingering touch. “As you need, and want, and were meant to be.”
Mine. Charlie heard the word ring in his head, but kept it from his lips. He’d fought and managed to turn her unexpected insistence to his advantage. But enough was enough. Before she could snap free of the sensual web he’d woven, he withdrew his hand from beneath her skirt, framed her face, and kissed her—deeply, as deeply intimate as he wished.
“For to night, that’s enough.” His growl bore testimony that that wasn’t his body’s wish any more than it was hers. His mind, however, was firmly in the ascendant.
She frowned at him. “Why?”
Her favorite word. He managed not to frown back. “Because if we let our horses bolt, we’ll go too fast and you’ll miss too much along the way.” He capped those eminently sane words with a statement it was impossible to dispute. “And we need to get this right because there’s only ever one first time along this road.”
The next afternoon, Charlie stood in one corner of the high hedge bordering the vicarage lawn balancing a teacup on a saucer and, his expression as impassive as he could make it, considered his wife-to be, sitting sipping tea in the diagonally opposite corner, as distant from him as she could possibly be.
Who would have thought it could be as bad as this? Charlie cursed the impulse that had prompted him to accept an invitation to the monthly Sunday-afternoon tea party at the vicarage; he’d heard that Mrs. Duncliffe had intended to invite Mr. Sinclair, and had accepted assuming Sinclair would be present, and that he’d be able to distract himself discussing investments while keeping Sarah in sight.